As
we move toward Inauguration Day and the beginning of the Trump
administration, there are many questions surrounding U.S foreign policy
and national defense. That’s a bit worrisome, because uncertainty in
Washington and the West has often been the enemy of stability and peace
in the last hundred years.

To be sure, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to “promote
regional stability and produce an easing of tensions in the world.” He promises a foreign policy “tempered by realism,” an end to the “defense
sequester” and a national security strategy premised on “peace through
strength.” And he says he will “make America strong again” and “make
America safe again.”

Toward that end, Trump wants to build up the active-duty Army to 540,000 soldiers, the Navy to 350 ships, the
Marine Corps to 36 battalions and the Air Force to 1,200 fighter
aircraft, while pouring new resources into “a state of the art missile defense system.”

With the Middle East on fire, Europe on edge, Russia on the march,
China on the rise and the Korean Peninsula, as always, on the verge,
these are sound and much-needed policy initiatives that would serve the
national interest—indeed, Trump vows to “view the world through the
clear lens of American interests”—and promote international security
(which itself is in the national interest).

Yet Trump also has declared,
in a surprising echo of President Barack Obama’s “nation building here
at home” mantra, “We have to build our own nation.” He has embraced the historically-fraught “America First” label. (Whether he did so
aware of its historical connotations or unwittingly is unclear, but
neither alternative is particularly comforting.) He has threatened to
“terminate” NAFTA, declared that South Korea and Japan “do not pay us
what they should be paying us” for the U.S. security umbrella, and concluded that “NATO is obsolete.”

Put these two halves of Trump’s foreign-policy vision
together—building up and pulling back— and it looks like the blueprint
for a 21st-century “Fortress America.” As history reminds us, the
security payoffs of such an approach are ephemeral and fleeting. Both
the national interest and international security suffer when America
turns inward.

Costs

We have heard much from Obama and Trump about the costs of
engagement—and understandably so. The Cold War cost Americans 104,000
military personnel and $6 trillion. Post-9/11 wars have claimed more
than 6,800 military personnel and consumed nearly $2 trillion. (The
human and material costs of war serve as the best argument for deterrence.)

But we hear little about the costs of disengagement: Pearl Harbor in
1941; Korea in 1950; post-Soviet Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban,
which provided safe haven to al Qaeda; Iraq and Syria today, which
spawned ISIS.

And we often ignore the benefits of engagement. During World War II,
U.S. engagement prevented a return to the Dark Ages. During the Cold
War, U.S. engagement preserved free government, elevated human rights,
rehabilitated Germany and Japan, and transformed Europe from an
incubator of war into a partnership of prosperity. For 71 years, U.S.
engagement has prevented war between great powers, which was the norm
from 1745 to 1945. Not coincidentally, U.S. forces have been deployed in
Europe since 1944, Japan since 1945, Bahrain since 1948, South Korea since 1950, Kuwait since 1991. Today, it is
only America’s forward presence (though spread thin due to shortsighted
withdrawals as well as the bipartisan gamble known as sequestration)
that is keeping Eastern Europe free from Russian intervention and
keeping the Pacific relatively pacific.

This isn’t charity work. We aren’t getting a “bad deal,” to borrow a
phrase. An international order that tilts in favor of free governments
and free markets, a peaceful Europe, a stable Asia-Pacific, the free
flow of oil through the Persian Gulf, an open trading system connected
by open sea lanes—all of this is in the national interest. In fact,
America benefits from the liberal international order (that America
helped build) more than any other nation. As Paul Miller of the National
Defense University observes, “Liberal order is the outer perimeter of American security.”

Contrary to the nation-building-at-home caucus, upholding the liberal
postwar order through alliances and engagement isn’t a waste of
resources or a diversion from our interests. It’s the very opposite: A RAND study concluded that “a 50-percent retrenchment in U.S. overseas security
commitments could reduce U.S. bilateral trade in goods and services
annually by as much as $577 billion…Based on conservative assumptions,
the resulting annual decline in U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) would
be $490 billion.”

Dangers

To be sure, U.S. engagement often falls into the category of
enlightened self-interest. But what’s wrong with serving the interests
of the United States, while, along the way, serving the interests of
humanity? As President Dwight Eisenhower observed,
“We could be the wealthiest and the most mighty nation, and still lose
the battle of the world, if we do not help our world neighbors protect
their freedom and advance their social and economic progress. It is not
the goal of the American people that the United States should be the
richest nation in the graveyard of history.”

Eisenhower knew that freedom and progress need a helping hand. So he
didn’t pull back from the world; he didn’t accept the twin myths that
America is either too good for the world or can do no good in the world;
he didn’t withdraw from Korea; he didn’t cut short nation-building
missions in Japan and Germany that would take a generation to succeed.

Instead, Eisenhower (and President Harry Truman before him) forged a
national consensus about America’s place and purpose in the world: to
build a liberal order in which America could flourish, to engage the
world and lead the West, to guard the frontiers of freedom and contain
the Soviet Empire.

But a quarter-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union—after 15
years of waging war on terrorism—that consensus has frayed. According
to Pew polling, 57 percent of Americans want the U.S. to deal with its
own problems and “let other countries get along the best they can on
their own”—up from 30 percent in 2002 and 20 percent in 1964. That
explains why Obama and Trump embrace a decidedly-standoffish approach to
the world.

This is not easy for (or on) the rest of the world. After decades of
Cold War continuity, U.S. foreign and defense policy has lurched from
President George W. Bush’s “ending tyranny in our world” military
campaigns, to Obama’s “nation building at home” retrenchment, to what
sounds like a hybrid of “don’t tread on me” nationalism and pre-Great
War noninterventionism under Trump.

These post-Cold War gyrations explain why Tony Blair worried and warned in 2007,
“The danger with the United States today is not that it is too involved
in the world. The danger is that it might pull up the drawbridge and
disengage.”

They explain why, during the failed Twitter Revolution of 2009, Iranians shouted, “Obama, are you with them or with us?”

They explain why, with Qaddafi bearing down on them in 2011, Libyans jarringly chanted, “Bring Bush! Bomb the planes!”

They explain why, with Washington “leading from behind,” France had to fill in as captain during NATO’s operation in Libya.

They explain why Secretary of State John Kerry warned long before
Trump even announced his candidacy, “We cannot allow a hangover from the
excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess
of isolationism.”

They explain why Gen. David Petraeus concluded, again long before
Trump was on the political scene, that “inaction” in Syria led to
“profound risks and costs for our national security.”

They explain why, after Obama erased his “red line” in Syria and
failed to punish Assad for reopening the Pandora’s Box of chemical
weapons, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls sighed, “We have created a
monster…If we had bombed as was planned, I think things would be
different today.”

They explain why Assad himself said of the Americans, “You cannot take them at their word…We don’t listen to their statements.”

They explain why, after Washington sent him MREs and nonlethal aid, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told Congress that his beleaguered nation “cannot win the war with blankets.”

Roles and Rules

“When America is willing to step forward and defend the rules-based
order that it did so much to create,” Rasmussen observes, “the result is
peace and stability.”

Peace and stability are very much in America’s interests. But when
America does not actively promote international order, as history and
the headlines remind us, the world grows less stable, less peaceful and
more dangerous—and that’s decidedly not in America’s interests.

The liberal international order forged after World War II did not
emerge by accident and does not endure by magic. Now, as in 1945, it
depends on America projecting power into the global commons, supporting
free government, promoting free trade, defending freedom of the seas and
skies, deterring aggressive states, enforcing international norms of
behavior, and serving as civilization’s first responder and last line of
defense.

The United States cannot play that role—at least not
effectively—while “leading from behind” or focusing on “nation building
here at home” or waving the “America First” banner.